November 1, 2017

Trump Targets Senator Schumer After Manhattan Terrorist Attack

It looks like the president received his talking points from Fox & Friends—again.

Bill Clark/ZUMA

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President Donald Trump pinned blame for Tuesday’s deadly terrorist attack in Manhattan on New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, claiming the Senate minority leader’s support for a diversity visa lottery program allowed the suspect entry into the country. He also accused Democrats of being too soft on immigration. 

In tagging Fox & Friends at the end of his morning tweets on Wednesday, Trump appeared to acknowledge he was parroting an argument made on his favorite television show just moments before.

It has not been confirmed if the 29-year-old suspect in Tuesday’s attack, Sayfullo Saipov, was a recipient of the program cited in the president’s tweets. According to a description listed on the State Department’s website, the Diversity Visa program offers “countries with historically low rates of immigration” roughly 50,000 visas to the US. “The DVs are distributed among six geographic regions and no single country may receive more than seven percent of the available DVs in any one year,” the website explains.

Schumer responded to Trump by accusing him of “politicizing” his home state’s tragedy, where eight people were killed and 11 injured after a man drove a truck into a bike line in Lower Manhattan.

“I have always believed and continue to believe that immigration is good for America,” Schumer said in a statement. “President Trump, instead of politicizing and dividing America, which he always seems to do at times of national tragedy, should be focusing on the real solution—anti-terrorism funding—which he proposed cutting in his most recent budget.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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